Landscape architect Mien Ruys once kept a dune in check Landscape architect Mien Ruys once kept a dune in check

Her first use of wooden railway sleepers came about when she was asked by architect Gerard Holt (1904–1988) to come to his recently completed villa in the dunes of Overveen in the Netherlands. “He was unhappy about something; what exactly, he didn’t know,”recalled Ruys in a radio programme in 1987. Holt had positioned his villa at the foot of the dunes, keeping the main volume sleek and simple to contrast with the sharply rising shape and movement of the slopes covered with scrubs and trees. According to Ruys, it felt “as if the dunes were coming in and knocking you over.”

The dunes needed to be pushed back to achieve a more open character, and the powerful railway sleepers set into the sloping site did the trick perfectly. Moreover, Ruys made clean lines more playful by cutting the wood into different lengths. Because the staggered floors in the split-level house follow the sloping terrain, you can walk out onto a path or terrace from each level. Inside and outside merge seamlessly.

Mien Ruys had transformed the humble railway sleeper into an important gardening tool. Her distinctive approach and inventive use of materials caught the eye and many commissions quickly followed. Soon the sleeper was a common sight in garden design and Ruys became known as Bielzen Mien (‘Sleeper Mien’), a nickname she was not fond of. “Then everyone started imitating me. They made the most horrible things! They filled up every front garden, every residential area with sleepers, in the most hideous way. I have to watch it with a sense of hopelessness and am, of course, powerless. I can’t patent it, or ban it, it’s an idea. Too bad.”

With her architectural approach to garden and landscape design, Mien Ruys was a trailblazer and one of the first female designers in a male-dominated world. Because of her collaboration with so many of the celebrated architects of her day, some of her drawings are held at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, where the National Collection of Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning is kept. As a child, fashion designer Bonne Reijn spent a lot of time with Ruys, who was his great-aunt. He would spend his summers at the Moerheim nursery in Dedemsvaart, where she had her summer house and test plots for experimenting with plants and designs. Reijn recently explored the collection in search of hidden stories about his famous relative.

Text Emily Wijns, collection manager Nieuwe Instituut

This text was originally written for and published in MacGuffin Magazine, No. 12, The Log. The visual material has been adapted for this online version. You can read the article as it appeared in MacGuffin here.